Following and friends

Anyone who’s interacted with me for any significant period of time will tell you that I pretty much suck at replying to email, keeping up with things, keeping up with people.

I have gotten slightly better at this lately, with my new technique: push almost everything away from me, allow the rest to slip through the cracks, and constantly adjust the cracks as needed.

For this, I have come to rely on two things: virtually ignoring everything by forcing myself to read my email through a dated web UI and Firefox’s app tabs feature — with this, I can quickly check things if needed, but can mostly ignore things too.

For identi.ca, where I only read/reply to responses, and Twitter, where I constantly prune down the people I follow, this is also a challenge, yet still better than the Facebook metaphor of ‘Friends’ — while some of the people I follow are my friends, many are people I don’t know. Conversely, I am not following many of the people I do know… why? Because I know them, I don’t need to see their lives in 160-character updates. Most of the people I’m interested in seeing short posts from are the kind of people I’d subscribe to on an RSS reader if that wasn’t a lost cause to me.

Using RSS, like podcast subscriptions and not eating Skittles is one of those things I would like to eventually do, but won’t, because the interfaces are just too cumbersome.

If I’m not following you, or I stop following you, or I don’t reply to your emails, or phone calls… it’s not that I hate you, but probably more that I’m relying on you a little bit to not hate me for doing it. I probably will reply to your text messages.

If you sent me something and I didn’t reply within about five days, send it again.

If you’ve sent me email, and I haven’t responded, there are three likely causes. Either I did send a response, and your system bounced it due to a misconfigured anti-spam filter; or my own email sorting system has decided you aren’t interesting; or I haven’t gotten to your message yet.